perfidy

Not bad, not bad, although I fear that a nontrivial number of people, rather than taking away from it, "Don't act hastily and out of fear, and don't assume linear outcomes from nonlinear systems" will instead take away, "There are no problems anyway," or "Don't do anything -- it'll all work itself out."

And I'm not thrilled with him vectoring ye olde "Thirty years ago we were worried about global cooling!" I'm fairly certain I saw a piece recently which showed pretty conclusively that nothing ever appeared in peer-reviewed meteorological, climatological or geological publications which suggested an impending cooling or ice age.

But definitely worth reading. I'm of the opinion that a) climate change is going to happen with or without us, the anthropomorphic principle being good only for Douglas Adams punchlines; b) we have probably made many aspects of it worse; c) we've probably also passed a point of no return after which we can't really slow or reverse our contribution, so the only real question is d) how are we going to adapt?

Phil,
The first thing to do is to get woolly mammoths up and running again before the labs ice over. The mammoths will be the only game big enough to sustain our clans.

We'll also need to decide who our shamans are going to be, that we might get new animal totems.

Excellent pick! Crichton is head and shoulders above the doomers. Not because there is nothing to worry about. Because doomers waste far too much of our time on the things not worth worrying over, while the real problems languish.

I particularly enjoyed Crichton's juxtaposition of several different "doomer" scenarios side by side, showing the use of the same propagandist language for each "cause of doom." David Brinkley's quote was worth reading the talk by itself.

I want my animal totem to be the lemur.

Having slept on it, it would be interesting to see Crichton's arguments here, on the dangers of fear-mongering, the value of prudence, and the actions of nonlinear systems, placed into a different context: That of the War on Terror. I wonder how people otherwise inclined to praise it -- and there's a lot of praiseworthy material in there, along with a lot of fluff (one group of people being wrong about something before doesn't mean a different group of people are wrong about a different thing now, regardless of how their tactics and pronouncements appear to intersect) -- might suddenly be inclined to ignore it.

But that's just me being provocative. I'm off to carve a lemur statue.

Phil,
I didn't understand most of that last response, out of both an unwillingness to concentrate (it still being a semi-holiday hereabouts)and allowing myself to get a head start on atrophying my higher mental functions. You know, to conserve energy I'll sorely need in the frosty Afterworld.

But if it's one thing I do understand, it's lemurs. And animal totems. And that you can't just run about willy-nilly choosing your own totem. Otherwise everyone would just be, you know, badass animals like panthers or eagles or trapdoor spiders and whatnot.

However, since you chose lemur, maybe the clan can let it slide. I dunno, I'm not running for shaman or anything, I'm just saying.

As one of my bios states, my totemic animal is a forty pound New York sewer rat. You aren't allowed to carve them, you have to catch them with your teeth and stuff them with sawdust yourself.

Phil, you might be interested to read some of Crichton's other speeches - go to the main site, they're cleverly filed under "speeches." Crichton clearly cares about the environment, in the sense that he'd like it to be there, and healthy. In fact, his opinions as stated over those several speeches very closely mirror my own.

I think the point of bringing up the ice world scenario (which the ministry is devoutly committed to bringing about) was to point out the similarity in rhetoric. I worked in the environmental movement for a couple years, and I can confirm from my own experience that for many environmentalists, it is religion for them.

Thanks for the link Buckethead. I didn't realize there were so many speaches there. I remember reading the "Aliens Cause Global Warming" speech a while ago, and it contains this gem:

"Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?"

Not that we should be counting on a paradigm shift to solve our problems, but it's interesting to consider...